Environmental sensors can be employed to detect various environmental conditions, such as gas concentrations, temperature, pressure, acceleration, geographic location, magnetic fields, humidity, seismic conditions, among other sensor functions. These sensors can be integrated into various other devices, such as wireless communication devices, smart phones, and computing devices, or can be stand-alone sensor devices which can communicate over various wired and wireless networks.
However, these sensors and sensor devices might not be trusted to provide secure or reliable data to various remote data collection sites, especially over wireless data networks. Various forms of security concerns are present in many of these sensor systems and wireless data networks. For example, the sensor might be impersonated by another malicious sensor system, or the sensor might not be authorized to transfer data to a certain remote data site. Although encryption can be employed to protect data in transit, the original data prior to encryption might be altered or corrupted by malicious or unauthorized systems or users.
Some sensor devices or communication devices include partitioned security ‘zones’ on the associated processing systems. For example, a first zone can be employed to execute open or untrusted applications and obtain untrusted or unauthenticated data, and a second zone can be employed to execute trusted applications or obtain authenticated data. These security zones can be implemented on separate microprocessors, in separate cores of a multi-core microprocessor, or otherwise allocated over different processing portions of a computing or sensor device. However, when multiple sensors are employed on a device with these security zones, indicating which sensor to use or authenticating data from a specific sensor can be difficult due to the various security zone measures.